Trash Poetica is a digital poetry project which combines creative writing with mapping technologies to chart and repurpose the items which are being discarded as “trash” in Tuscaloosa. Its aim is to explore the ways that trash or garbage can be re-envisaged and take on a new, productive life if approached through a creative lens, as well as showcasing the wide-ranging environmental impact of the discarding process on our local community.
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Dr. Catherine Davies and her class of graduate and undergraduate students explore language in the state of Alabama. They examine the difference regionally in Alabama, as well as generationally to see how language changes in Alabama.
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UA Genealogies: Historical Archives and Storytelling is a digital archive of the extraordinary family histories discovered by students in Lauren S. Cardon’s EN103 Advanced Composition course. Using a variety of digital and archival resources including the W. S. Hoole and A. S. Williams III Special Collections, students explored their genealogies, creating written narratives documenting particularly significant people or moments in their family histories. UA Genealogies showcases students’ findings about their heritage: in the Narratives section users can browse full-length stories, whilst the Map section displays these stories geographically to give a sense of the global origins of our community at the University of Alabama. Over time, this project will be added to by students participating in future iterations of this course to build a rich narrative documenting the history of the UA student community.
This site is the work of Lauren Cardon’s students in EN 455: Advance Studies in Writing. The theme of the course was Global Foodways. Each student chose a regional, national, or cultural cuisine to research for the entire semester. Their projects included oral histories, landscape analyses, informational overviews, recipe blogs, restaurant reviews, food memories, and literature reviews. The best part of this class? Getting to sample all the cuisines!
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This website is the first iteration of a project exploring early modern epic writing from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In this first incarnation, the project focuses on commonplaces, scrutinizing Spenser and Milton’s engagement with these as a way of understanding how they are structuring their epics, and in turn, how these are crucial components defining what it meant to write epic in English. The site will house a digital commonplace book documenting Spenser and Milton’s use of recurring literary touchstones including images, rhetorical and logical structures, and lexis, and visualizations of these commonplaces, the first of which are being forged by Dr. Emma Annette Wilson and her graduate class, EN668, at the University of Alabama in Fall 2015.
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This project engages students from English 205 (English Literature I) and English 215 (Honors English Literature 1) with Dr. Cordelia Ross to create contextual timelines for their course to better understand events surrounding the publication of works they read.
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Headed by University of Alabama graduate students in the Department of English, in partnership with Dr. Emma Annette Wilson and the ADHC, the Early Modern Network Of Networks, EMNON, uses Digital Humanities techniques to visualize the intricate network of relationships connecting key figures in early modern literary and intellectual culture. Centering on the networks belonging to and shared by poets and politicians Andrew Marvell and John Milton, EMNON offers a new understanding of how early modern writers and thinkers related and interacted. An ongoing project, the site will continue to grow in coming years as students and researchers here and further afield contribute to it, allowing us gradually to visualize the social network of key early modern writers and thinkers.
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This site was created for David Ainsworth’s Spring 2013 Digital Humanities graduate course. It is now being updated for Jennifer Drouin’s Spring 2015 Digital Humanities graduate course. The site features student blogs and final projects. We hope it will continue to grow over the course of future semesters as well.
This website is designed for and populated by undergraduate students taking survey courses in British Literature. Students are responsible for writing short texts situating the literary works which they are studying in the time period in which these works were created. These student-generated blurbs appear on a digital timeline to enable users of this website to achieve an understanding of British literary texts in the context of the historical and literary cultures surrounding their original production. This project will continue to grow with each new iteration of students taking EN205 with Geoffrey Emerson, enabling peer-to-peer learning from semester to semester.
It is easier than ever to disseminate words and ideas expressed through the human voice. And of course, it is common practice in the literature classroom for teachers to read texts aloud and to ask students to do the same. However, there is little conversation in English departments about the skill it takes to read such literature aloud or about how the voice can influence our perspectives on literature. The UA Voxology seeks to address this gap, to begin to teach the voice in the literature classroom by compiling an audio anthology of local voices reading from classic American and British literature and by encouraging students and community members to contribute to that anthology. We envision an interactive hub for such content, similar to Pandora or Spotify, that situates new recordings within a larger whole and encourages listeners to browse and immerse themselves in the collection, creating their own recordings and adding their own voices. The UA Voxology will act both as a resource for the classroom and as another way the University can reach out to engage the larger community. The long-term goal of the project is to create a high quality audio database of English and American literature that students and teachers can use to experience and study how the human voice affects our experience of literaturedent.
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